Obama reassures Saudi king of ties

NO CHANGE:The US president visited King Abdullah to clear up policy concerns, officials said, and while Syria was discussed, human rights in Saudi Arabia were not

AFP, RIYADH

US President Barack Obama, left, meets with Saudi King Abdullah at Rawdat Khurayim, the monarch’s desert camp 60km northeast of Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, on Friday.

Photo: AFP

US President Barack Obama sought on Friday to allay Riyadh’s criticism of his policies on Syria and Iran, telling the Saudi king that their two countries remain in lockstep on their strategic interests.

He also assured King Abdullah that the US “won’t accept a bad deal” with Iran, as global powers negotiate a treaty reining in Tehran’s controversial nuclear program.

“The president underscored how much he values this strategic relationship,” a senior US administration official said, after Obama met for about two hours with the king on a royal estate outside Riyadh.

In an interview aired on US television later on Friday, Obama defended his administration’s decision not to use military force in Syria, saying that the US has its limits.

The US leader’s comments came in an interview taped ahead of his visit to Saudi Arabia, which was angered by his 11th-hour decision last year to pull back from strikes against the Syrian regime over its use of chemical weapons in the country’s civil war.

“It is, I think, a false notion that somehow we were in a position to, through a few selective strikes, prevent the kind of hardship we’ve seen in Syria,” Obama told broadcaster CBS in Rome.

“It’s not that it’s not worth it,” he added. “It’s that after a decade of war, the United States has limits.”

“And it’s not clear whether the outcome, in fact, would have turned out significantly better,” he added.

Now in its fourth year, the bloody civil war has claimed more than 146,000 lives and displaced many others, causing a refugee crisis in the region.

Earlier, White House officials said part of the discussions would focus on ways to “empower” Syria’s moderate opposition.

However, officials shot down as untrue reports that the US administration was planning to give Riyadh a green light to ship man-portable air-defense weapons, known as MANPADs, to the beleaguered moderate Syrian opposition.

“This was not a trip or a meeting designed to coordinate detailed questions or types of assistance to Syrians,” added the US official, who asked not to be named.

Riyadh also has strong reservations about revived efforts by Washington and other major world powers to negotiate with Iran.

Sunni Muslim Saudi Arabia, long wary of Shiite Iran’s regional ambitions, views a deal in November last year between world powers and Iran on Tehran’s nuclear program as a risky venture that could embolden Tehran.

The interim agreement curbs Iran’s controversial nuclear activities in exchange for limited sanctions relief and is aimed at buying time to negotiate a comprehensive accord.

Obama made clear to the king the US was “determined to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon, that we’ve gone into the talks eyes wide open, but that we believe this is a common interest in stopping proliferation to Iran,” the US official told reporters.

He also stressed that Washington remained “very much focused on Iran’s other destabilizing activities in the region.”

Iranian-Saudi rivalry crystalized with the Syrian conflict: Tehran backs Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s regime, while several Gulf Cooperation Council states support the opposition rebels.

Obama’s stand on events reshaping the region “have strained relations, but without causing a complete break,” Jeddah-based Middle East Centre for Strategic and Legal Studies head Anwar Eshki said.